


The Road to Damascus

by cupiscent



Category: Cobra Starship, Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-18
Updated: 2010-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:31:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cupiscent/pseuds/cupiscent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gabe and Draco's meandering potions odyssey (or, and stop me if you've heard this one before: a Spaniard and an Englishman walk into a bar in Tripoli...)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Road to Damascus

**Author's Note:**

> This is the bandom/HP crossover that probably never had to happen, except in my head. I made a loose promise of [From the Ashes](http://asylums.insanejournal.com/from_the_ashes/) backstory swap with airgiodslv, and then Tom Felton [grew up hot](http://cupiscent.livejournal.com/494301.html#cutid1), and it was like fate? If you're not familiar with Ashes, [this is Gabe](http://inyrbasemnt.insanejournal.com/320.html), but probably all you need to know is that this is bandom names inserted into pure HP-verse: after a third wizarding war in England, Gabe winds up teaching Potions at Hogwarts. This is pretty self-contained, and part of what came before that.

**Potenza**

The guy came in the first time when Montalbano - the ingredient provisioner Gabe was working for because... look, it was a long fucking story, all right? Anyway, the old man was doing his usual afternoon thing, down on the piazza drinking amaro and playing briscola and talking shit with the other old wizards, leaving Gabe to mind the store. Afternoons in southern Italy were even lazier than afternoons in southern Spain, so Gabe was continuing his reading through Montalbano's frankly amazing collection of _Cauldron Europa_ back-issues, feet up on the counter, when the bell over the door rang and this guy stepped in.

He looked more Scandinavian - all blond and pale and perfectly pressed - than British, but he was barely halfway through his second sentence when Gabe laughed and said, "I speak better English than you do Italian."

He was _so_ British. Fiddling with his slightly-too-long white-blond hair, asking for half a dozen ingredients no one ever bothered exporting from England because there were three better substitutes, getting snooty when Gabe started offering advice on the potion he was obviously - from that list of ingredients - making. And actually, yes, Montalbano _did_ talk to his customers like this; Gabe had learnt so much ingredient theory just from hanging around in this little shop that he was going to have to actually go back to Marseilles to thank the irritating fucker who'd sent him down here.

Well. Maybe. He'd been _really_ irritating.

Anyway, Gabe had filled the Bitchy Brit's order, taken his money, and been prepared to forget him entirely. Except it really was boring in the shop in the afternoons, and the article on temperature dynamics Gabe had been in the middle of was mind-numbingly technical. The guy had been _so_ caustic about not making a Hardening Tincture, but what else could he have been doing with that ingredient list?

The third time he read the same sentence about flame colour, Gabe sighed, tossed the magazine aside, and reached for Montalbano's heavily annotated _Enciclopedia della materia arcana_.

-

The next day, Gabe was crossing the piazza about four hours earlier than he'd usually even be awake, and he saw white-blond hair bent over a table outside the cafe. He deviated without even thinking about it, dragging up another chair and dumping his muddy sack on the cobbles beside him. Blondie looked horrified, edging his espresso cup away. "Do you mind?" he inquired, words like chips of ice.

"You're making a modified Insinuation Elixir," Gabe stated, and the guy's face just went blank, which was good as an admission. "What I _can't_ figure out is how you're getting gecko skins to substitute for salamander scales, because that should blow up in your face."

Blondie lifted a pale, arched eyebrow. "I fail to see how it's any of your business."

Stupid, inane, English thing to say. Obviously it was entirely Gabe's _business_, but he'd readily admit that he had no right to simply expect an answer for nothing in return. It would've been nice, though.

Gabe leaned over and picked up his sack again, and Blondie yanked his book off the table like he was worried Gabe might get it dirty any minute now. "I have been out all night," Gabe declared, ignoring all of that, "harvesting stargrass--"

"Where from?" Blondie interrupted.

But Gabe had no compunction - trying to get information out of him or not - in responding equally quickly with, "Fuck off." Stargrass was a bastard to grow in a greenhouse, and wild patches were few and far between; even if Montalbano wouldn't have skinned Gabe alive for giving away the location of his patch, Blondie'd have to slide under the table and fucking _blow_ Gabe before he'd even come close to earning that sort of information. And he knew it. So Gabe just continued easily with, "But I _will_ give you a handful if you talk me through the potion."

The guy wavered, but from the way he eyed the sack - which Gabe was not going to be taking his hands off now - he was sold. "Fine. You're right," he said unnecessarily, leaning back in, his elbows on the edge of the table. Gabe mirrored him; he was _buying_ this info, no need to let anyone else get it for free. "It's an Insinuation Elixir, but you elide the silk straining completely and grind up the gecko skins with nettleberry juice."

When the guy was sounding that fucking stuck-up about it, Gabe wasn't going to admit that his English wasn't good enough to know what _elide_ meant; he'd look it up later. Right now there were more important things anyway. "Occidental nettleberry?" He didn't see how that could possibly work.

The guy shook his head, tucked his hair back behind his ear. "Irish. I brought some with me when we--" He flicked long, pale fingers, waving that point away. "You don't seem to sell it down here."

"Because there's no discernible difference," Gabe said, and wondered why he was so keen on defending Mediterranean potioneering.

"Really," Blondie countered, with a bit of a smirk.

Well, he had a point. "That would..." Gabe squinted across the piazza, trying to figure out how that would change things. He'd read something in his past couple of weeks of trawling through _Cauldron Europa_ about Irish nettleberries, hadn't he? "There was this article, written by some guy. English. Snake?"

And he looked back just in time to see an expression he couldn't even start to pin down flicker over Blondie's face. "Snape," he corrected.

That was it. "Yeah." Gabe watched Blondie, but the guy wasn't giving anything away. "You know him?"

A shrug of one skinny shoulder. "I knew him. He was the potionsmaster at Hogwarts."

Hogwarts. It sounded familiar, but Gabe was still trying to figure out where he'd heard it before when Blondie sighed, rolled his eyes and said, "Britain's wizarding school." He didn't add, _you dim foreigner_, but it was obviously in there.

Not like Gabe gave a fuck; he just grinned brightly, because eight years at _Spain's_ wizarding school (never mind the other ten-odd with his family) had taught him nothing irritated superior fuckers like their insults being ignored. "He knows what he's talking about, this Snape guy. Creative. You lot over there seem pretty traditional, most of the time."

Something twitched in Blondie's cheek; he looked down. Gabe had no idea what to make of any of that until the guy said, "Well, he's dead now. Few years back."

Gabe would never even pretend he knew a lot about Spanish history, let alone English, but when your grandparents had all fought either for or against Grindelwald, you paid at least a little attention when someone came along being hailed as the next iteration. "That Volde-whatever guy?"

Blondie flicked him a glance, just a flash of those grey eyes, and then he was staring nonchalantly across the piazza again. "Yeah," he said.

"That's a shame," Gabe said lightly, but however close he watched this guy, nothing was showing up. "I would've liked to sit down and talk business with him." He pushed back from the table, tilting his chair up on two legs, and said, "So this Elixir, when you--"

But they were interrupted when the cafe waitress stuck her head out through the open window. She was the daughter of the owner, and normally Gabe quite liked the way she rolled his name out from behind that smirk, but this time she was delivering word that Montalbano had just been on the Floo, wondering where the hell his no-good helper had got to with the stargrass.

"_Mierda_," Gabe muttered, chair legs clattering on the cobblestones as he stood up.

"Hey," Blondie said, and held out a hand.

Gabe stared at him blankly for a moment, before remembering. "Oh yeah." He reached into the sack and grabbed a handful of long, pale strands of grass - they were practically a match for the guy's hair. "Listen, if you're going to be around this evening..."

But the guy shook his head, tucking the grass carefully between the pages of his book. "I'm leaving today."

Gabe pulled a face. He would've liked to see what else he could pick out of this guy's brain. "Well, if you're going back to England--" He stopped; however nonchalantly the guy was tucking his book away right now, for a moment there his face had been pure thunder. "Not going to back to England. Ok."

Blondie glanced up, and shrugged - totally casually, not that Gabe was buying it. "England doesn't have a lot going for it right now."

"I thought it was a land of renewed hope and fucking opportunity. Golden age of free wizarding. Blah blah blah." Gabe slung the sack over his shoulder.

The guy stood. He wasn't as tall as Gabe, but he held himself like the rest of the world was scenery in the background of his dramatic self-portrait. His sneer looked well-practiced. "What the fuck would you know about it?"

He had a point; Gabe just grinned. "Well, if you're looking to get your alchemist ticket, I wouldn't bother trying Florence. Radecchio's the worst sort of tease; all promises and no action." The guy just stared at him with ice-grey eyes, and Gabe added, "If you ever get down to Tunis, though, look up a guy called Hitt and tell him Gabe says hi."

-

There were another two old wizards in the shop when Gabe got back, sitting there in their strange check trousers and weird little caps, the ceiling blue-hazed from their pipes. All three - visitors and Montalbano both - cackled when Gabe came in, and there was an exchange of ribald comments too quick and thick with dialect for Gabe to follow. He dumped his sack on the bench, where Montalbano flipped it open, sifting his fingers through the strands. He gave a short nod, no smile on his crumpled up face, but he raised no quibbles, just started sorting the grass, and Gabe didn't bother hiding his satisfied grin as he turned around to lean casually against the bench.

"Where you been?" one of the old men demanded - the owner of the cafe.

"With your daughter."

Gabe said it with his best leer, but the old man just cackled. "You get story out of that--" and then he used some dialect phrase that Gabe couldn't decipher. Something about black? At Gabe's perplexed look, the old man jabbed his pipe stem in the direction of the piazza. "_Inglese_."

Gabe shrugged. "We just talked potions."

"You solve mystery?" Montalbano asked creakily.

Which he hadn't asked about before, and Gabe hadn't told him, but the old man _had_ looked over the afternoon's sales yesterday, and glanced at the pages of notes Gabe had made from the encyclopedia, so Gabe should have expected he'd be all over it. "Insinuation Elixir," he said. "With Irish nettleberries."

Montalbano nodded thoughtfully, his fingers whispering on the stargrass. "You think he has talent?"

Six months ago, when Gabe first came into Italy from France, he would've responded immediately to that, and deprecatingly; what was anyone else's talent compared to _his_? Now he thought - about the guy's manner about ingredients and processes, about the work he'd read of Snape's - and shrugged. "Maybe." He looked over at Montalbano and added, "He doesn't have a European license. I think he's going to try Radecchio."

Montalbano snorted, and Gabe grinned.

*

 

**Carthage**

After knocking around the Balkans for something like eight months, the hammer-on-anvil sunshine in Tripolitana was a bit of a fucking over-reaction; Gabe might have rashly declared he wasn't going inside for three weeks, but two days after he got to Sabratha, even he was spending most of the day in cool coffee houses with wet linen stretched over the windows. All the people he came down here to talk to were in there anyway, so there was little point baking outside alone.

They didn't move fast in this part of the world, and Gabe had resigned himself to a week of nothing but gossip before anyone was even willing to admit to having a cauldron, let alone brewing anything in it. He had plenty of his own news to share - from Italy, from Albania, from Romania - and it was getting to the stage where he knew better than half of the rest of the names that got bandied about: el Mouggi in Alexandria, Mahmoud in Casablanca, the incomparable Soffia in Palmyra.

Someone mentioned Gabe's old fellow-apprentice from Spain, and the fact that he had a very respectable trade going on up in Tunis, not to mention a new English apprentice. Perhaps Gabe should have twigged, but while there were fewer Brits around north Africa these days (as opposed to a few years ago, when England had been turned upside down and shaken and its contents were strewn all over fucking Europe) there were still enough, and it _had_ been eight months.

So Gabe didn't even think about it until he shouldered through a beaded curtain in Tunis, bellowing, "Come out with your hands--" and stopped dead.

The guy's hair was longer, ragged and flyaway and even blonder than it had been in Italy. His skin was darker, though, and it just made those grey eyes all the more arresting. He was dressed casually, shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal forearms marred with all the tiny burns and cuts a potioneer never had time to heal properly. He'd been washing glassware; now he looked up, one eyebrow lifted.

"Holy shit," Gabe said. He remembered, now, an owl a few months back from Rob with some obscure note about pale English lilies as gifts, but he hadn't made the connection. He couldn't remember now if he'd never known the guy's name or had just forgotten it.

Feet clattered down a flight of stairs somewhere out of sight, and Rob came barrelling through the back door, brushing past Blondie as he shouted, "Mother_fucker_, I _thought_ that was you." He swept Gabe up into a mammoth hug, actually getting his feet off the floor. "How are you not dead yet?" He shoved back to arm's length to look Gabe up and down, and laughed. "We are fucking catching up. Drake?" he turned back. "You right to close up?"

Blondie looked up from his resumed glass washing. "Sure," he said, and then Rob was dragging Gabe back out through the beads.

-

The next morning, Gabe's mouth still tasting like the ghost of licorice past, he staggered downstairs to where Blondie had managed to open up again - either that or he'd just stayed in the shop all night. Gabe couldn't remember if he'd been there when he and Rob had come in. He couldn't remember a fair bit of last night.

He leant against the frame of the doorway, dragging a hand over his face as he said, "I'm sure Rob has some _blastum clar_\--" which was as far as he got before he got his eyes opened to see a pale (paler than his own, anyway) hand holding up a slim vial of something bright pink. "Thanks," Gabe declared, and downed the lot. Going slow with Rob's brews had never been rewarding.

When the shudders stopped and his vision cleared, a voice with an English slant was saying, "That could have been anything."

Gabe wedged the empty vial in amongst the other dirty glassware in the sink. "And I'd still have thanked you." He looked up and added, "Drake." Grey eyes flickered in his direction, and Gabe felt recovered enough to smile, lean against the bench. "See the Mediterranean still hasn't managed to file the edges off your accent. Did your Italian get any better?"

Drake gave his head a twitch to keep his hair out of his eyes as he leaned forward over a mortar; it had the absent air of a habit, and Gabe watched the blond strands slide slowly down towards his ear until he twitched again. "You were right," Drake said, straightening again. "Radecchio was a waste of time."

"So you came here." Gabe grinned. "I'm so flattered."

He got a skewering look. "I went to Sardinia. Worked with a friend's family for a bit. When we came down here to harvest salt I decided to stay." He tipped the contents of the mortar into a jar, looking up as he did so. "Your friend's pretty good."

Gabe nodded absently. "We apprenticed together." There were more important things at hand though, like, "_Carthaginian_ salt?" Drake set the mortar down and leaned against the bench nonchalantly, a faint and superior smile hovering around his mouth. "You're fucking with me," Gabe declared. "You do not know where there's a well."

Both eyebrows went up, and the smile settled in to stay. "Oh, don't I?"

There was noise from upstairs; Rob was finally out of the shower. Gabe took two steps closer to Drake, shoulder to shoulder at the bench, and said quietly, "Take me harvesting and I will teach you shit Rob never even had the balls to try."

Slow steps plodded down the stairs, accompanied by Rob's plaintive voice. "Drake?"

Drake leant across Gabe to pluck another pink vial out of a bristling tub of them. "We'll see," he said quietly.

-

The well was in a tunnel under some ruins, with a chink in the rocks above so the full moon could shine down into its shaft, glistening off the salt crystals that lined the walls. The very salt the Romans had sowed the ground with, brimming with raw, vindictive magic.

Gabe was the one down the well, shaving off the crystals to pass up to Drake, who spread the ooze out to dry on fine linen treated to absorb the extraneous shit. When they eventually shook the salt into two jars, there didn't seem to be much at all, but there was enough in one of those jars - say, the one Drake tossed his way as they packed up - to make every potion Gabe had even heard of with this stuff in it, and buy all the other ingredients he'd need. He shook the jar happily before tucking it into his shirt pocket.

When he looked up again, Drake was dangling a bandana from one hand, the colours of it leached out by the moonlight. Gabe pulled a face. "Oh, come on."

"You come on," Drake shot back, and snapped the bandana between his hands. "I told you--"

"Yeah yeah," Gabe said, slinging his bag over his shoulder. "Family secret of your friend's. Not a family to piss off. Whatever." He stepped closer, edging Drake back a step into the moonlight, turning his hair silver. Gabe grinned. "I think you just like blindfolding me."

Drake gave him a level look that was cut off by the bandana going over Gabe's eyes. He had to step close to tie the ends behind Gabe's head, and in the cold desert night the warmth of his body was evident. On the way here, Gabe had had to follow him, getting a mouthful of blond hair every time they stopped unexpectedly. It had been quite soft, and nice-smelling for a potioneer.

"I can't be the first guy to make a proposition," Gabe said, smirking blind. "You went to an English boarding school."

Drake tugged on the blindfold; it was done up tight. "With _girls_," he said pointedly, but not (Gabe thought; hard to tell without visual confirmation) angrily. "You just want my half of the salt," he added.

Gabe laughed, and followed when Drake's hand on his arm tugged him forwards. "Not _just_," he said.

A deal was a deal. Drake got five new items of potions theory to add to his repertoire, and Gabe went back to Sabratha with a small fortune in his battered bag. And a new correspondent.

*

 

**Alexandria**

The first owl came from Tunis still; Drake had gained his journeyman alchemist's ticket. The second came from Marrakesh, though it took a while to catch up to Gabe, since he'd moved on from Malta by that time. The third didn't actually come from Drake at all.

The remnants of imperialist control in Lower Egypt were the most interaction Gabe had ever had with official British wizardry, and frankly on the basis of that, he was never so much as dipping a toe in the Channel. They could fucking keep it.

Among the more charming practices of the remnant hitwizard crews in the old province was the insistence that any foreigner picked up - and Gabe knew from experience how flimsy the charges could be - needed a registered escort to the border. He wondered if he'd been Drake's first choice, or just the first one the hitwizards had deigned to deem reasonable. That seemed unlikely. Gabe had been considered a lot of things in Egypt, but reasonable had rarely been one of them.

Gabe took the first carpet to Memphis, apparated to the official ground at Alexandria, grinned insolently at the flunkie on the front desk as he presented the official notice, and got ushered in to see the captain. He was an elderly wizard with lungs like a pair of bellows and a moustache like a hedgerow. He trumped Drake as the most English person Gabe had ever met.

"You're willing to stand escort?" the captain trumpeted, thumping his fist on the crumpled notice Gabe had handed over.

Gabe grinned, sprawling as insolently as he could in his chair. "I'm here, aren't I?"

The captain leaned forward, his frown drawing his eyebrows together like a second line of defense. "Do you know who this chap really is?" A blunt finger stabbed at the name on the official notice. _Drake Nott_, it read.

It wasn't that Gabe wasn't curious. It was that Drake had never once - not even indirectly - asked why Gabe left Spain. He shrugged, and said, "I don't care. Can we go now?"

-

Drake didn't leap to his feet when the cell door opened, just tilted his blond head lazily against the wall - his hair was even longer, brushing his shoulders, and he looked like some romantic English notion of a heroic prisoner, languid and lazy leaning against the back wall of the cell, outstretched legs crossed at the ankle.

When he saw Gabe, his eyes widened.

"Salaam aleikum, brother," Gabe said, and grinned. "Come on, let's get the fuck out of here."

There were no carpets leaving for the next two days, and with Drake banned from using magic until he was outside the country, their options were limited. They took a boat instead, one of the coastal crawlers heading up towards Tel Aviv.

They made themselves comfortable on an out-of-the-way bit of deck, shadowed by oily-smelling canvas. The sailors scampered around them, shouting at each other in Hebrew.

Drake didn't say thank you. He said, "Aren't you going to ask what I did?"

Gabe shrugged, trying to wiggle his hipflask out of his back pocket without getting up again. "Time I got thrown out of Egypt, all I'd done was talk to this guy's fourth wife. I hadn't even fucked her yet." He got the flask out with a crow of victory, then kept it behind his back until the sailors looked away again. "Anyway," he added, "you might want to avoid old English territories for a bit. Captain seemed a bit thingy about you."

Drake refused the flask, then took it when Gabe insisted, but just held onto it for a bit, staring into its depths. "Nott isn't actually my name."

"Holy shit," Gabe said, completely dead-pan, "I'm fucking astonished."

One corner of Drake's mouth curled up, but he neither looked up nor took a swig. "I took it from a friend of mine. Last of his family. He doesn't need it any more, anyway." He did look up then, squinting off to the dazzling horizon. "He killed himself the same week I left England."

Huh. Gabe tried not to fidget. "You did say the place didn't have a lot going for it."

Drake snorted, his mouth twisted up. "Fine for some." He took a deep, pointed swig from the flask, and then spluttered half of it onto the deck. Gabe rescued his flask from the midst of Drake's coughing fit, and smirked as Drake managed to rasp out, "What the hell _is_ that?"

"The guy I'm working with makes it," Gabe said smugly, taking a much more careful sip. "When the still doesn't explode. He is a fucking lunatic. So I need to get back before he decides I've fucked off on him. You're on your own from Ashkelon, yeah?"

Splayed out on the deck like a damp rag, Drake still managed to make his, "I can look after myself," sound believable.

*

 

**Palmyra**

"You are a fucking hard man to find."

Gabe's chair, tipped back on two legs, nearly went over backwards as he looked up hurriedly. He didn't even need the flash of blond hair, the accent had been enough; when hands grabbed his arms, Gabe grabbed them right back, dragging himself upright to face Drake even as his chair clattered to the floor. "What the hell?" he declared, tugging at blond hair barely long enough to get a grip on. "Did you have to sell your hair to get out of Constantinople?"

That had been the last place Gabe had received an owl from, but that had been a month and a half ago. There were faded remnants of painted-on lines, dark against pale skin, where the neckline of Drake's shirt revealed his collarbones. That was something Gabe knew from experience, so clearly he'd missed the past of the story where Drake had been in Smyrna recently.

Drake noticed him noticing, and his mouth curled wryly. This - a tea den in Antioch - was clearly no place for the sort of catching up they had in store. "What have you been _doing_?" Drake demanded. "I've been chasing you all over the Levant for the past ten days."

"I've been getting some shit together," Gabe admitted. "I'm heading out to Palmyra tonight." He tossed a few coins down on the table, righted his chair, and picked up the little raw silk bag off the table. Bouncing it on his palm, he eyed Drake. "Come with me."

Drake blinked. "To Palmyra? You're kidding."

Gabe tugged at the collar of Drake's shirt with one finger; the old ink looked a little like bruising now, but in a day or two it'd just be a memory. "You're good enough."

"Better than you," Drake shot back with a smirk, batting his hand away, and Gabe just laughed as they walked out the door.

-

Getting Soffia's attention was no easy matter; Gabe would have known this even if Palmyra weren't half full of initiates of various levels trying desperately to do it. She was one of the pre-eminent alchemists in the old world. (There was a guy in Reykjavik who was apparently the goods, but Gabe wasn't going anywhere called _Ice_land, for fuck's sake, and that went double for the brother-sister duo being awesome in Murmansk. Gabe hadn't even known Europe went that far up. There was also, obviously, the Jade Council in western China, but you needed to prove Han descent to join their school. Plus Gabe had heard there was a guy in the Serengeti whose ingredient craft was second to none, but frankly, Palmyra was closer.)

Where was he? Oh yeah, in Palmyra, sharing a tiny flat over a glassware store with Drake, arguing about how to make Soffia take them on as students.

"This place is _insane_," Drake declared, kicking the door closed behind them.

"I like it," Gabe replied, setting his bag carefully - it clinked nonetheless - on the table.

"You would." Drake flung his wide-brimmed hat down next to the bag; the hat looked completely ridiculous, but so did Drake with a sunburnt nose. "The woman at that last stall told me she knew a place I could duel, if I was interested."

And in Palmyra, that wouldn't be the blatant, boring sort with wands, either. "Did she tell you where it was?" Gabe asked absently, as he pulled one small bottle after another carefully out of his bag. "I haven't seen a proper alchemy duel since Samarkand."

Drake smacked the back of Gabe's head, but he did wait until his hands were nowhere near any of the bottles to do it.

-

Potions were more than a list of what went into them and when. That was just _knowledge_, and the purpose of Palmyra was manifested in the chosen name of its mistress. _Wisdom_. You came here when you thought you were ready to take that step, and hoped to make her believe so too.

Oh, skill with the cauldron was important; both Gabe and Drake had made their official applications, labouring for an afternoon under the supervision of ostentatious officials to present a vial to be labelled with their names. But that wasn't everything, and every other hopeful milling around the town's squares and alleyways knew it too. They assumed they were watched at every moment - and they were, by each other even more than by those who might answer to Soffia.

Thus the duels, the displays in the street, the games of _shah_ \- both on and off the board. Alliances, betrayals and manoeuvrings both frantic and subtle were merely the eddies of this strange alchemy, and those who knew the rules weren't dropping hints.

And if Drake one evening wasted a whole pinch of Carthaginian salt cultivating someone who turned out to have no useful connections, did it really matter? Maybe just having tried it would tip the balance. Maybe letting it get about that he had the salt in the first place would spark the interest of someone important.

Maybe not.

So Gabe shrugged and passed the bottle of vodka his friend in Kiev had sent him, and Drake shrugged and drank from it, swinging one leg over the edge of their roof next to Gabe.

They'd been here a month. They might be told the verdict any moment. They might wait years. Maybe patience was the point. Maybe leaving was.

They finished that bottle and started another, lying on their backs on the flat roof with the day's residual heat soaking through their shirts. The sky was massive above them; there were so many fucking stars in the desert. Gabe felt like maybe that was the point. You could see more out here.

"Where will you go if you don't get in?"

It wasn't the first time either of them had asked the question, but Gabe didn't feel much like returning their usual blithe denial that such an event could ever come to pass. "I don't know," he said instead. "Maybe east again. Tamerlane knew a lot of shit, and I passed through pretty fast last time." He tilted his head back enough to see the glint of moonlight that was Drake's hair. "What about you?"

Drake shrugged; something heavy and glass clunked against the roof. "Maybe I should go back to Italy and take my turn with Montalbano."

Gabe snorted. "Maybe you should go back to Florence and duel Radecchio in the plaza." He rolled over, laughing. Drake had propped himself up against the edge of the roof, his hair haloed in the moonlight. "Maybe you should go back to England."

"Maybe you should go back to Spain," Drake shot back, quick and harsh.

Gabe just shrugged. "Maybe I should," he said, and watched Drake drink from the bottle, half turned away to stare up into the hills. "Come on," Gabe added, quietly. "Nothing's that bad."

"What the fuck would you know about it?" Drake demanded, crisp and English under the warm Syrian night. "There are worse things than your grandmother's disapproval."

Silence fell. Gabe reached out and took the bottle from Drake's unresisting hand; Drake didn't apologise, and Gabe didn't acknowledge that it was just the truth.

"I did go back, you know," Gabe said, after the dull burn of the vodka had scraped over his tongue. "Last year, for my brother's birthday."

"You never said."

Gabe tilted his head to give Drake a long, pointed look. "I bitched for half a foot in an owl about my family."

One corner of Drake's mouth curled up. "I thought you were drunk and bitter."

"I was." Gabe swigged from the bottle again, grinning. "What's your point?"

Drake took the bottle and swirled it around, the little remaining liquid within picking up moonlight. "I still have a few friends in England," he noted, offhand and nonchalant. "Now and then they keep in touch." He was quiet for a while after that, but watching his face was more interesting than thinking of something to say, so Gabe stayed silent as well until Drake continued with, "I got an owl the other day."

Gabe had noticed of course, but they both had a dozen plans in the works at present. "Begging for you to come home?" he hazarded.

Drake found that very amusing. "She is not," he said, "the sort of girl who begs." He shook his head, his smile lingering. "Maybe. Sort of. Not quite. There's something brewing there. Something ugly."

Drake had lived through Voldemort, even Gabe could put that much together. Something ugly, he said. England doesn't have a lot going for it, he'd said. "If you went back," Gabe said, "which side would you fight on?"

"Neither," Drake replied, too quick, too brusque. "I won't. I couldn't. There's no point." He sat up, not entirely steady. "There's no point going back. Fuck them." He drank, one final, sharp, vicious swig, and repeated, "Fuck them all," as he wound his arm back, and hurled.

The bottle went spinning up into the night sky, the final remnant of vodka spraying across the surface of the moon, and Gabe watched its parabola over the square, tilting back his head to laugh, to keep an eye on it as he fished his wand out of his pocket and fired. The bottle exploded low over the midnight square in a shower of purple and green sparks, and Gabe flopped back, wrist against the edge of the roof, still laughing.

Still laughing when Drake's knee nudged against his, when his hand landed on Gabe's shoulder, the other hitting the edge of the roof above him, and his breath hot on the corner of Gabe's mouth, his lips the same. "Hey," Gabe said, laughter and breath surprised out of him, and Drake smothered his open mouth, licked inside, blocked out the moonlight. Gabe reached a hand up, laid it along Drake's pale jaw, levered up into him and kissed back. "I didn't think--" he muttered, when Drake eased back a moment, but Gabe didn't really know where to started enumerating all the things he had and hadn't bothered thinking too much about in all the long months since they'd first met.

"Life's too fucking short," Drake stated, stark and tired and slightly desperate, no growl to it.

But he bit at Gabe's mouth when they came back together, fingers tangling in his hair, and Gabe let him. Let Drake throw everything at him, just took it all in, and rolled them over on the roof to run his hands over Drake's moonlight-silvered skin. Kissed him like this might be the only chance he ever got.

-

The next morning there were green and purple globules of glass embedded in the shopfront across the square; dark marks along Drake's shoulder that had nothing to do with magic ritual; a large man with a curved sword across his back banging at their door before the sun was fully over the horizon.

"You," he said, pointing past Drake to where Gabe had slumped down on the third step. "You come with me." His gaze flickered. "You put some trousers on and come with me." Around the hand Gabe was scrubbing over his face, he could see the sigil tattooed between the guy's collarbones.

Drake met Gabe's gaze with perfect, cool aloofness, but tossed a pink vial of _blastum claritopia_ across the room to him. Gabe wedged it between his teeth, pulled a t-shirt over his head, went down the stairs two at a time to head out into the dawn with Soffia's man.

*

 

**The Desert**

Soffia was small and immaculately veiled, her eyes bright and dark and the only part of her face not swathed by layers of fine black. Her hands were heavy with rings, at least one of them a poisoner's well, but when she passed a glass of tea across the low table between them, Gabe took it without the slightest hesitation. Its flavour was finely delicate, and sliced effortlessly through the last shreds of hangover that still clogged the corners of Gabe's mind. "Never mind alchemy," he said, sipping again before setting the glass down again on its little golden feet. "Can you teach me to make tea as perfect as that?"

She laughed, gently and obligingly, kicking her bare feet up onto the cushioned couch beside her. She had a tinkling anklet and surprisingly girlish feet for the depth of her laughter and the fine lines that webbed her eyes. "Tea?" she repeated, mocking. Her voice was a little rough around the edges, like the sand blowing at the walls of the tent. "You have come all this way to learn to make refreshments?"

Gabe's heart was beating a little fast, but he kept his smile and his gaze steady. "A perfect product can only come from a perfect process."

"You are very glib," Soffia said, as though confirming for herself what she had heard from others. Despite his best intentions, Gabe's mind spun out into a moment of wild consideration of everyone he had spoken with in Palmyra, of who might have passed that on to her. "But you are very young," she continued, and Gabe forced himself to pay attention. She picked up her own glass of tea, and said, offhand, "I knew your grandmother, you know, when we were both still girls." She sipped, as Gabe reeled, and added, "How does she view you?"

Gabe took a deep breath and gripped his knees to stop even the faint chance of fidgeting. "She wants me to do as I'm told." He smirked, and added, "She wants me to be less of my father's son."

Soffia's head tilted, and though he couldn't see the smile on her face, Gabe could see it in her eyes. "You assume I mean your mother's mother," she said, and he blinked. But before he could say anything, she added, "I do. And I think she sees your skill, and wishes you were more her daughter's daughter. You'd make lace as well as you make potions, I'm sure. I worry," she continued, without any pause for Gabe to take in what she was saying, "that you do not know yourself as well as you know alchemy. That you have looked outwardly more than inwardly. I cannot teach a man who does not know himself."

Now they came to it. Gabe pushed aside all the rest of the turmoil she'd raised, and asked, "What do you need me to do?"

-

"Friit's Tears?" Drake repeated, still sprawled out on the couch where he'd been reading when Gabe came back in. "What the hell's that?" He no longer swore like an Englishman, Gabe noted. No more Merlin this and Merlin that.

"Hallucinogen," Gabe said shortly, flicking through one of his journals for his own notes. "Turns your brain inside out and shakes it. Some divinatory schools fucking love it, which--" He laughed. "--I am avoiding them, because it's crazy shit. Can snap your mind if you're not careful. The first time, at least."

"You're talking about the Curse," Drake said.

Gabe snapped his fingers. "That's what you guys call it; Bathory's Curse. The insane Hungarian chick." He tossed aside that journal and reached for his Balkans one, finding the right page easily now.

"And you're going to take it."

"If I can make the thing without..." Gabe trailed off, dragging his finger down the side of the page over the potion outline. It was surprisingly easy; fiddly as all hell and Gabe could see at least two places where he was going to be going sleepless for long stretches, but it wasn't actually difficult. There was a sub-solution included in the ingredient list, and Gabe flicked back a bit to make sure that was as basic as he remembered it being, and somewhere between pages something in Drake's voice actually filtered deep enough into his brain to register.

He looked up, over the edges of the pages, under his eyebrows, across the room to where Drake was still draped, limp and languid, over the end of the couch. A pale eyebrow lifted. "What?" Drake demanded.

"What?" Gabe demanded in return.

"You're looking at me funny," Drake said, dry and sardonic. "Even for you."

"You were talking at me funny," Gabe shot back. "Even for _you_." But this didn't feel like standard bickering, and Gabe didn't even know where to _start_ diagnosing the problem. "Is this because of last night, or because she sent for me and not you?"

"Those are the choices, are they?" Drake sneered, and tossed his book aside, standing up. He seemed really tall when he was being haughty, and even slamming his hat atop his head didn't change either. "I'm going to the markets before they close. Do you have everything you need?"

It wasn't an offer; more like a challenge. Gabe was saying, "I'll be fine, thanks," before he even really thought about it.

And half a moment after he did, Drake was stalking down the stairs, calling back, "Better get started, then."

Gabe did have everything he needed for the potion. He couldn't see any reason not to.

-

It took three days to make the Friit's Tears. The first day, Gabe pretty much didn't come out of the lab; he could hear Drake in the main room sometimes, just doing normal things, talking to an owl once, or whistling as he made tea, but when Gabe finally came out, the place was empty, and a plate of figs and dates was holding down a note that said simply, _Desert salamander_, so Gabe assumed the hunting trip Drake had been trying to arrange had finally come to fruition. Gabe moved the plate, and the note flipped over in the breeze. On the back, it said, _Congratulations on Soffia and thanks for the blowjob_, and Gabe nearly choked on a fig.

-

Gabe fell asleep with the potion on its final stage, which was a habit he really needed to break, but when he woke up the cauldron was cold and there was a slim, simple vial of glimmering pale-blue liquid leaning against one of its feet. He came staggering out into the main room, and Drake was just there in the kitchen, frowning at a newspaper over a cup of his appalling English tea. He glanced up with that cool, blank look he gave the whole world when Gabe set the vial down on the bench.

"Thanks," Gabe said, slumping onto a stool and yawning fit to make his jaw crack.

"Sloppy," Drake said, setting his cup in the saucer.

"Passion over precision," Gabe shot back, and if this didn't quite feel like the other day, it also still didn't feel like standard bickering, for all the words were the same as ever.

"Precision." Drake's mouth twisted, not with amusement, not with anything Gabe could name, but he looked pale, and sharp, and he shoved his saucer a little across the bench, making tea slop over the rim of the cup. "I don't belong here," he spat.

"What?" The tone was one Gabe had been expecting every moment since Drake's mouth had hit his, but the words weren't _I can't do this_, and he was thrown off balance, gaping. "What's belonging got to do with anything?"

"Nothing," Drake said, aloof and crisp. "For you. You do."

"Fuck off," Gabe retorted, stung. "I left--"

"You haven't left anything," Drake interrupted, leaning forward over the bench between them. "You're up to your fucking neck in old-world wizardry and wading deeper, and you're in your element. The whole width of the Mediterranean you do it all the same; throw yourself in, act on instinct, _believe_."

"So get throwing," Gabe declared, waving a hand. He held up the little vial in the other. "Make your own. We have all the ingredients, there's enough left."

"No." Drake shook his head, folded his arms across his chest, but he looked like he was holding himself together, looked pale and younger than he ever had, even that first time they'd met in Italy. "I promised I'd... no more stupid shit to _prove myself_." He spat the words like they were something filthy.

Gabe felt cold. He curled his fist around the vial. "That's not what this is." But Drake just shrugged one skinny shoulder, looking pinched tight, like Gabe was demanding something of him, like Gabe had _ever_... "You kissed me," Gabe reminded him, on the verge of furious.

"I'm sorry," Drake said, English enunciation cool in the hot Syrian air.

"_Fuck_ you," Gabe spat, and stalked out, taking the potion with him, slamming the door behind him at the bottom of the stairs.

*

 

**The Road to Damascus**

Gabe came back to himself - and the phrase had never felt so appropriate - lying on the cool, sumptuous carpet of Soffia's tent. He splayed his fingers over the soft weave of it and held on; just that and breathing was enough, for now. The world was sideways. He stared at his hand clutching at the carpet, at the scar on his thumb where he'd cut it slicing hawthorn. He clung to the memory of that. Of being in this body. Of being himself.

He couldn't remember what had just happened. He didn't want to. It was carved into the inside of his mind in lines that threatened to burst open at the lightest touch. His head was ripe with the threat of pain.

Girlish feet stepped into his field of view, and the external enforcement of the correct alignment of the universe was like a kick to the solar plexus. Gabe gagged on it, coughed hard, rolled over violently onto his back, but if the world spun, at least it spun _around him_. A girl leaned over him - dark hair loose and unveiled, with the bright, dark eyes of Soffia in a face no older than ten - and for a moment he saw a cobra the size of a mountain looming, its hood spreading to become the sky, lightning flickering on its forked tongue.

The girl didn't object to his grip on her ankle, just crouched and helped him sit up, wedging cushions behind him as Gabe gasped and tried to hold his head together with his cradling hands. When he finally managed to look up, she handed him a tall glass - water, with a stick of cucumber the height of the glass in it. He drained it and she refilled it from a brass ewer she nursed against her canted hip, waiting for him to hold the glass out again.

When he finally paused, breathing hard with the glass still half-full, she said something; the syllables meant nothing at all, and for a moment Gabe panicked, until she said, "English?" and then smiled at his relief. "_Tayta_ Soffia see you when ready."

"I'm ready," Gabe said, the words scraped from his throat.

-

"This is why," Soffia said, leaning forward to refill his glass herself; the girl had left the ewer on the table. When she'd set it down again, she reached out and patted his cheek, her rings cold. "A man not whole cannot truly create. If your path brings you here again, I will teach you how to make tea. You were nearly right: _worthwhile_ products come from worthwhile processes." She settled back on her couch. "Say hello to your grandmother for me, when you see her."

"I will," Gabe promised, the first words he'd spoken since he'd come into the room. He drained his glass one last time, and pushed aside the curtained door of the tent to step out into the desert night.

-

He walked east and a little bit north along the road, towards Palmyra and the burning horizon. When he crested the final hill, he saw the first glint of the sun, the town below him, a pale figure walking up the slope towards him.

Drake looked up and gaped, hesitated, strode twice as fast up the hill. Gabe took in the bag slung over his shoulder, the hat on his head. "That was fast," he said, but there was no hollowness to it, no anger, not that much pain at all, really. They'd been moving in their own oscillations since the first moment they met; really, it had been pure, brilliantine luck that they'd had this long in the same place.

"Shut the fuck up," Drake snapped. "It's been two sodding days." He grabbed Gabe's chin, tilted his face up into the growing light. "You look like shit."

Two days with the talons of the Friit's Tears tearing at his veins; Gabe believed it, but it still made his knees wobble, made him grab Drake's wrist for balance. "I feel like shit," he said, smiling even though he wasn't sure how pretty it'd look right now. "I'm glad you waited," he continued, and just kept talking when Drake glared, tugged his hand back. "I wanted to tell you you were right. Maybe I do belong here. It's my world." Drake shrugged his bag higher on his shoulder, looking bored, until Gabe added, "That's why I'm leaving."

"What?" Drake stared at him, eyes the colour of the sky above them. But he didn't ask why; never had, and they never did. Instead he demanded, "Where?"

Gabe honestly hadn't known, not until this chance meeting on the road, but now he said without hesitation, "England." Drake stared again, and Gabe said, just as impulsive, "Come with me." He winced the moment the words were out of his mouth, scrambled to add, "Not like that. I know... it's not... it's fine."

"I was curious," Drake said, loud enough to cut through Gabe's babble. In the silence that descended, Drake cleared his throat, kicked a pebble off the road beside them. "I was curious," he repeated. "And I thought that you... you'd never made any _secret_... I trusted you." He said it like a challenge, glaring up from beneath the brim of his ridiculous hat. "I'm not sorry it was you. But I'm not interested in..." He waved a hand. "And I know that you are, I knew that before, and that was a completely shit thing to do to a friend."

There was still a bit of a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, but his grin wasn't forced and there was no shadow of a lie when Gabe said, "I'm not in love with you, Drake."

Gabe thought maybe the furrow between blond eyebrows was serious for a moment, but then it creased exaggeratedly, and Drake said, "Why the fuck not?"

Gabe laughed then, and slung his arm around Drake's shoulders, swung them both around with their backs to the new-risen sun and their new shadows stretched out in front of them, along the road leading out of Palmyra. "Seriously," he said, "come with me to England. It was your home. Reclaim it."

Drake shook his head, hanging onto the wrist Gabe had draped over his shoulder as he stared out into the desert. "I don't think the England I thought I lived in ever really existed. Maybe that was even a good thing." Letting go, he shrugged Gabe's arm off him, stepping up the hill and turning around to grin back at Gabe. "It's all yours, baby." He hesitated, taking a step backwards, then added, "Give it hell."

Gabe grinned back. "Fuck yeah," he declared, starting to amble backwards, down towards Palmyra. He caught the final, smirking twist of Drake's mouth, and then they both turned around.


End file.
